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An Open Mind

Ramamurti Shankar’s Physics 201 at Yale, coming soon to a portal near you. The course is Professor Shankar’s second to be put online.Credit
Photo Illustration by Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

At 83, Marian C. Diamond has been teaching anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, for 50 years. Her class is so popular that it’s difficult for students to get in, though she holds court at the campus’s largest lecture hall, with room for 736.

She begins by opening a colorful hatbox. Dressed in an elegant suit and scarf with her hair swept back into a chig­non, Professor Diamond pulls on a pair of latex gloves and reveals the box’s contents: a human brain. It is in alcohol, she says, “because alcohol will preserve the brain. Need I say more?” The students laugh as they take this in. She has the room in the palm of her hands.

Professor Diamond is one of the tweedy celebrities of cyberspace. Videos of her anatomy course, Integrative Biology 131, have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on YouTube, where they have been available since 2005 to anyone with an Internet connection. Some of the world’s foremost scholars are up there for viewing, tuition free. From Yale, you can tune into an economics class by a professor with his own home-price index, Robert Shiller, or a course by the Milton scholar John Rogers. The undisputed rock star academic is Walter H. G. Lewin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who flies across the room to demonstrate that a pendulum swings no faster or slower when there is an added mass (Professor Lewin) hanging at the end.

A decade has passed since M.I.T. decided to give much of its course materials to the public in an act of largesse. The M.I.T. OpenCourseWare Initiative helped usher in the “open educational resources” movement, with its ethos of sharing knowledge via free online educational offerings, including podcasts and videos of lectures, syllabuses and downloadable textbooks. The movement has also helped dislodge higher education from its brick-and-mortar moorings.

“Everyone is in one way or another doing O.E.R. today,” says Roger C. Schonfeld, research manager at Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit service that helps academic institutions use technology for research and teaching.

If the mission of the university is the creation of knowledge (via research) and the dissemination of knowledge (via teaching and publishing), then it stands to reason that giving that knowledge away fits neatly with that mission. And the branding benefits are clear.

The Open University, the distance-learning behemoth based in England, has vastly increased its visibility with open courses, which frequently show up in the Top 5 downloads on Apple’s iTunes U, a portal to institutions’ free courseware as well as marketing material. The Open University’s free offerings have been downloaded more than 16 million times, with 89 percent of those downloads outside the U.K., says Martin Bean, vice chancellor of the university. Some 6,000 students started out with a free online course before registering for a paid online course.

In December, iTunes U itself surpassed the 100 million download mark.

Undoubtedly, open educational resources have given higher education unprecedented reach.

So, a decade in, what has it taught us?

This is not an idle question.

Open course material on the Internet may be free, but getting it there definitely isn’t. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the principal financial backer of the open educational movement, has spent more than $110 million over the past eight years, with more than $14 million going to M.I.T. The cost of re-creating the educational experience is high. Only 33 of the 1,975 courses posted by M.I.T. have videos of lectures. Another hundred or so contain multimedia material like simulations and animations. The rest is simply text: syllabuses, class notes, reading lists, problem sets, homework assignments.

Relying largely on money from Hewlett, Yale has spent $30,000 to $40,000 for each course it puts online. This includes the cost of the videographer, generating a transcript and providing what Diana E. E. Kleiner, who runs Open Yale Courses, calls “quality assurance.” By next fall, Yale will have reached its initial goal of putting up 36 courses, and has plans to add more.

Mr. Schonfeld estimates that $150 million has been spent on open education over the past decade, and more money is coming in from other sources, including $8 million contributed last year by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But now the Hewlett Foundation is pushing its grant recipients to do more than just make courseware available. In a letter to grantees in February, the foundation said that the current financial climate had forced it to reduce its education grant-making budget by 40 percent since 2008, stiffening the competition. Hewlett would hew more closely to its primary goals: “to increase access to knowledge for all and improve the practices of teaching and learning.”

“We think O.E.R. can be the most cost-effective way to improve education and we’d like to see continued growth and expansion,” says Victor Vuchic, the Hewlett program officer responsible for open education. “We’d like to see data being gathered, and see these materials being improved, and we’d like to see new models of learning.”

Mr. Vuchic says the foundation is interested in projects that track and analyze who is using programs, look at how open education enhances learning, and examine how it is changing the future of education.

The Educated Consumer

M.I.T. officials like to tell about an unsolicited comment they received one day about the online course “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry.” “I learned a LOT from these lectures and the other course material,” the comment said. “Thank you for having it online.” The officials did a double take. It was from Bill Gates. (Really.)

Mr. Gates, the former Microsoft chairman, is not exactly M.I.T.’s target audience. Part of its original intent was to provide teachers with the raw materials to lead a course, especially in the outer reaches of the globe. (Independent groups have translated some of M.I.T.’s courses into Chinese, Persian, Spanish, Thai and Portuguese.)

But just 9 percent of those who use M.I.T. OpenCourseWare are educators. Forty-two percent are students enrolled at other institutions, while another 43 percent are independent learners like Mr. Gates. Yale, which began putting free courses online just four years ago, is seeing similar proportions: 25 percent are students, a majority of them enrolled at Yale or prospective students; just 6 percent are educators; and 69 percent are independent learners.

Instructors tell heartwarming stories about where their teaching has ended up.

Ramamurti Shankar, who has been teaching physics at Yale for more than 30 years and is one of its most popular lecturers, says he has received scores of e-mail messages, including one from a stay-at-home mother in northern Maine who lives 100 miles from the nearest campus (“Thank you again and again and again for giving me a way to expand my mind without losing my mind!”) and from a former investment banker in Spain (“Perhaps I should have pursued a physics degree”).

Professor Shankar is working on his second semester of recorded videos, and says that the experience has improved his teaching. This time around, he is trying to liven up his lectures. As a theoretical physicist, rather than an experimental one, his lectures are not particularly visual. “I tend to emphasize a lot of pretty ideas and the elegance of physical laws,” he says. Professor Lewin of M.I.T., on the other hand, can wow his students with in-class demonstrations.

So Professor Shankar has begun inserting links to specific portions of Professor Lewin’s course, and, “since any mistake would affect larger numbers of students listening online,” he says, he thinks harder about every topic he teaches in the classroom.

Yale’s videos are single-camera cinéma vérité (as much for economy as style). Dressed in jeans and black Converses, Shelly Kagan, a professor of philosophy,, sits on his desk, legs crossed, and occasionally springs down from his perch to pace the room. His intense, animated ruminations — the title of his course is “Death” — have brought fan mail from Mexico, Iraq, Korea and China. Several months ago, he got a response from somebody suffering from a brain injury and who was using the lectures to exercise his mind. “I don’t think anyone knows what this will do to education 15 years from now,” Professor Kagan says. “But even if it does nothing more than that, that’s enough.”

Hewlett and the foundations that have followed its lead in supporting open education don’t think that’s enough.

The Carnegie Mellon Approach: Doing More

The backers of free courseware acknowledge the benefit of self-enrichment. Still, they say they expect open education not only to expand access to information but also to lead to success in higher education, particularly among low-income students and those who are first in their family to go to college.

Joel Smith, vice provost and chief information officer at Carnegie Mellon, sums up the challenge: “Free lectures and open syllabi and reading lists are great if the goal is enrichment for people who are already successful in formal higher education. But if the goal is to truly give access to high-quality postsecondary education to most people, well, for that you need to do a lot more.”

Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative is working with teams of faculty members, researchers on learning and software engineers to develop e-courses designed to improve the educational experience. So far there are 10 complete courses, including logic, statistics, chemistry, biology, economics and French, which cost about $250,000 each to build. Carnegie Mellon is working with community colleges to build four more courses, with the three-year goal of 25 percent more students passing when the class is bolstered by the online instruction.

The intended user is the beginning college student, whom Dr. Smith describes as “someone with limited prior knowledge in a college subject and with little or no experience in successfully directing his or her own learning.”

It works like this: Virtual simulations, labs and tutorials allow for continuous feedback that helps the student along. The student’s progress is tracked step by step, and that information is then used to make improvements to the course. Several studies have shown that students learn a full semester’s worth of material in half the time when the online coursework is added. More students stick with the class, too. “We now have the technology that enables us to go back to what we all know is the best educational experience: personalized, interactive engagement,” Dr. Smith says.

While independent students can sense if they’re learning by how well they get through questions and exercises, there are no grades and no certificates of completion. As with all open courses, students can get academic credit only if enrolled at an institution that deems to award it.

That leaves many students without the official recognition they want.

Kevin Carey, the policy director of Education Sector, a research institution in Washington, audited Professor Kagan’s course. He enjoyed it. But in an essay in Inside Higher Ed in 2008, he wrote, “I would like one more thing from Yale. A small thing, but an important one. I would like a grade.”

Not only would he have liked to send in the three papers assigned and have them graded, but he also was willing to pay Yale for it. And if his grades were good enough, he would have liked credit for his new understanding of death. “Credit that I could apply, if I wish, toward a degree at Yale, or any other institutions of higher learning that will have me,” he wrote.

That won’t happen, and in the terms-of-use section of Open Yale Courses, the university makes that clear. Besides not granting degrees or certificates, open courses do not offer direct access to faculty. They, in other words, are strictly “for those who wish to learn,” as the Web site says. “Its purpose is not to duplicate a Yale education.”

Mr. Carey’s point is that while a university is willing to share some of its lectures, the job of ensuring that a student has learned a subject — and certifying that fact with credits and degrees — remains Yale’s province. Yale is exclusive.

Mr. Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R agrees. “There’s no question that breaking down barriers wherever they exist is usually a good thing,” he says. “But you still have people who can’t actually sit in the class. It’s like they’re up on their tiptoes peeking in the window and seeing it happening, but they still can’t sit in the lecture hall as matriculated students receiving credit.”

A Wiki New World

Open courseware is a classic example of disruptive technology, which, loosely defined, is an innovation that comes along one day to change a product or service, often standing an industry on its head. Craigslist did this to newspapers by posting classified ads for free. And the music industry got blindsided when iTunes started unbundling songs from albums and selling them for 99 cents apiece.

Some imagine a situation in which the bulk of introductory course materials are online, as videos or interactive environments; students engage with the material when convenient and show up only for smaller seminars. “In an on-demand environment, they’re thinking, ‘Do we really need to show up face to face at 8 a.m. with 500 other students to take Psychology 101?’ ” Mr. Schonfeld says.

Some campuses are already experimenting. To alleviate overcrowded classrooms and test new e-learning tools at California State University, Chico, students taking a twice-weekly introductory course in psychology go just once a week and work online the rest of the time.

Mr. Schonfeld sees still more potential in “unbundling” the four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree. “Traditionally, they’ve all lived in the same institutional setting.” Must all four continue to live together, or can one or more be outsourced?

Edupunks — the term for high-tech do-it-yourself educators who skirt traditional structures — are piloting wiki-type U’s that stitch together open course material from many institutions and combine it with student-to-student interaction. In September, Neeru Paharia, a doctoral student at Harvard Business School, and four others from the open education field started up Peer 2 Peer University, a tuition-free, nonprofit experiment financed with seed money from the Hewlett and Shuttleworth foundations.

Ms. Paharia doesn’t speak the same language as traditional educators: P2PU “runs” courses. It doesn’t “offer” them. There are currently 16 courses, in subjects as diverse as behavioral economics, music theory, cyberpunk literature and “managing election campaigns” (and all with a Creative Commons license that grants more freedom of use than a standard copyright). Several hundred people are taking classes, Ms. Paharia says.

P2PU’s mission isn’t to develop a model and stick with it. It is to “experiment and iterate,” says Ms. Paharia, the former executive director of Creative Commons. She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.

“We live in a new society,” Ms. Paharia says. “People are mobile. We have the Internet. We don’t necessarily need to work within the confines of what defines a traditional education.”

David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, is an adviser to P2PU. For the past several years, he has been referring to “the disaggregation of higher education,” the breaking apart of university functions. Dr. Wiley says that models like P2PU address an important component missing from open courseware: human support. That is, when you have a question, whom can you ask? “No one gets all the way through a textbook without a dozen questions,” he says. “Who’s the T.A.? Where’s your study group?”

“If you go to M.I.T. OpenCourseWare, there’s no way to find out who else is studying the same material and ask them for help,” he says. At P2PU, a “course organizer” leads the discussion but “you are working together with others, so when you have a question you can ask any of your peers. The core idea of P2PU is putting people together around these open courses.”

A similar philosophy is employed by Shai Reshef, the founder of several Internet educational businesses. Mr. Reshef has used $1 million of his own money to start the University of the People, which taps open courses that other universities have put online and relies on student interaction to guide learning; students even grade one another’s papers.

The focus is business administration and computer science, chosen because they hold promise for employment. He says he hopes to seek accreditation, and offer degrees.

Mr. Reshef’s plan is to “take anyone, anyone whatsoever,” as long as they can pass an English orientation course and a course in basic computer skills, and have a high school diploma or equivalent. The nonprofit venture has accepted, and enrolled, 380 of 3,000 applicants, and is trying to raise funds through microphilanthropy — “$80 will send one student to UoPeople for a term” — through social networking.

“A lot of people are telling us, ‘It’s you or nothing,’ ” he says. “We’re the alternative to nothing.” Mr. Reshef says he received a letter from a young man in Ghana who had just enrolled. “He said, ‘I feel like a rich American student studying in an American university.’ ” And that, perhaps, is the broadest impact of all.

Katie Hafner, co-author of “Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet,” writes about the Internet and society from San Francisco.